Scan and Read Resources for Persons with Learning Differences

I presented to a great group of people last night in Douglas County, Colorado. We met for about an hour and a half during which time I completely overwhelmed them with a barrage of Assistive Technology resources for individual’s with learning differences. That was of course by design; I warned them up front that I wanted them to see a variety of possibilities rather than just one or two products.

By way of making ammends for the whirl wind tour that was last night. I’ve decided to compile some resources in my blog to help clarify several of the topics on which I spoke. I primarily covered reading tools during the talk starting with Scan and Read systems. So that’s where I’ll start now.

Scan and Read Systems

These programs are designed to scan and read printed documents out loud (this does not include handwriting). The two big players in this area are Kurzweil 3000 from Cambium Learning Systems and WYNN Wizard from Freedom Scientific. Both programs offer several features to assist with the reading, writing and study skills. However, their core purpose is to convert the printed word to editable text which can be read by the computer. This can include textbooks, magazines, novels, newspapers … anything with printed text. Both programs excel in this area. I’ll outline a few of their other features here:

• Simple interface
• High quality speech (less computer like)
• Highlighting of words as they are read
• Exact view of the scanned document (the page on the screen looks exactly like the document that was scanned).
• Ability to read web pages, PDF files, Word documents, text, and limited DAISY support
• Integrated study tools such as highlighting, annotations, bookmarks, and a variety of noting tools (footnotes, bubble notes, voice notes, etc..)
• Integrated editor with advanced word prediction
• Save a document to MP3 format for use on a music player
• Integration with online resources such as WikiPedia, Bookshare.org, Baen Free Library and more..

Here are screen shots of each program:

Kurzweil 3000

WYNN Wizard

There are of course many more features not listed here.

While these two products dominate the this category of software, there are other programs that offer quality features, including scan and read capability, at a lower price point. These include:

• TextHelp! Read & Write Gold from TextHelp! Systems
• Claro Read from claro software
• Scan and Read Pro from Premier Assistive Technology
• Last but not least is FreeOCR from FreeOCR.net. While this product will not read on its own, it can be used with a variety of free software programs to read the text its recognizes. Its hard to beat a free tool to perform opticalcharacter recognition.

Many of these companies offer demos of their software for trial use. Contact each vendor’s website for more details.